Well, the midterms are over, and the elections were indeed disastrous for Donald Trump’s Republican party. Commentators are now queuing up to declare MAGA dead – but they should all have read The Spectator back in March, when, at the start of the Iran War, Christopher Caldwell wrote a brilliant essay for us called “The End of Trumpism.”
“Trump is now carrying out the policy of the very think-tankers and democracy-spreaders he rose to power by promising to fight,” wrote Chris. “And it has apparently been many months since the people in whose name he campaigned have even flitted across his mind.” How true that was.
The war has been, as everyone now finally acknowledges, a colossal misstep by Donald Trump. In launching Operation Epic Fury, Trump betrayed his voters and his anti-war pledges, and he caused economic pain at home which has in turn hurt him and his party. But we said that even back in February, in a piece by yours truly which recognized the operation as Trump’s “Epic Fail.” That wasn’t clear to everyone back then, as media blowhards and war perverts urged Trump to “Stay The Course, Mr. President.” But we were right – because, as our former editor Boris Johnson once said, “The Spectator is always right.”
In April, too, our lead editorial warned that the misadventure in the Middle East was “costing Trump his coalition.” “The tragic irony will be that a President who came to power promising to undo the disastrous foreign policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama ended up making exactly the same mistakes,” we wrote.
Then, in May, we identified the other big factor in Tuesday night’s blowout against the Republican party. Our “It’s the corruption, stupid” cover piece was precisely on the money, as it were. “If Democrats are able to restrain themselves, they won’t find it hard to demonstrate Trump is a crony capitalist president,” wrote John Fund, and that’s exactly what happened.
Hindsight is easy, of course. But foresight is worth paying for. The danger now is that the commentary pendulum will swing too far in the opposite direction, writing off the Republican party as inevitably bust when in fact the picture is far more complicated and interesting. We won’t fall into that trap.
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